Global mobile telecommunications equipment supplier, Motorola Inc., won a significant victory in the Chinese market when China Mobile Communications awarded it five contracts valued at an estimated $146 million.

Under the new contracts Motorola will supply the necessary equipment for the expansion of the GSM and GPRS networks in five provinces and municipalities for China Mobile. The provinces covered under these contracts are Hubei, Jiangxi, Shanxi, Tianjin, and Beijing. These contracts come close on the heels of a similar contract that Motorola won earlier in April this year for supply of equipment for the network expansion in the Hunan Province.

With the GSM network in these provinces expected to reach an estimated 11 million subscribers, Motorola plans to use its market-leading Horizon systems GSM infrastructure solutions for the expansion work. The expanded networks are scheduled to be fully operational by the end of the year.

Motorola''s state-of-the-art Horizon GSM base station product is a cost effective solution for operators planning to migrate their second-generation (2G) networks to 2.5G since it only requires a software load and a PCU addition with no modifications to existing hardware. Motorola''s GPRS solution represents Phase 1 of Motorola''s Aspira(TM) total communications architecture, which combines voice, data and multimedia into one broadband IP- based network.

This total end-to-end network solution encompasses transport networks, applications, services and endpoint devices.

In addition, Motorola will provide a solution jointly with Cisco to expand the network coverage of the Beijing Branch of China Mobile''s GPRS network. The Motorola-Cisco alliance is the first global provider complete end-to-end GPRS network solutions in commercial service. The alliance is driving market growth and developing applications and value- added services to provide operators with innovative and competitive offerings for their subscriber base. The key in these services is the ability of the alliance to provide an architecture that can be implemented over an existing GSM network, thus helping protect operators investment in existing infrastructure.

The Motorola and Cisco strategic alliance, implemented through a joint venture called Invisix, is aimed at delivering end-to-end solutions for wireless Internet access and voice, data and video services on mobile networks. Its GPRS systems are in commercial use with operators around the world and are providing a critical path to third-generation (3G) mobile communications.